Death Race then and now (guess what, then wins!)

The first video game I ever played that didn't rhyme with "song" was Death Race 2000. Probably 1976, in an arcade in a mall across the street from my Kansas college. Just walked in one day and it was there, tucked among the pinball games, a macabre spinoff from Roger Corman's movie -- probably the first time such cross-promotion was used.

I couldn't believe what I was playing. The graphics were tiny stick-figure pedestrians and Model-T racecars on a black-and-white screen that would shimmer a little when you ran over a bystander for points.  Not the kind of sick entertainment you'd expect in Dodge City, where wheat is the only thing dancing. I guess Pony Express hadn't delivered the news that Death Race 2000 was pissing off parents everywhere else.

The movie was the same kind of forbidden fun, with David Carradine and pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone revving sports cars cheapily converted into killing machines. You could tell the film stock was sped up to make it look like they were actually going fast. Howlingly bad dialogue, buckets of blood and an amateurishly insightful subtext about fame and how far society might go to achieve it.

Remember that was 1975 looking ahead to 2000. Don't you think someone remaking Corman's flick in 2008 should foresee farther than 2012? Maybe not all the way to 3000, but Paul W.S. Anderson (not Paul Thomas Anderson by a long shot) takes his movie Death Race just four steps forward in calendar years and maybe six months back to the last car-slam extravaganza you saw.

Pop quiz: Which of these cars would you prefer to watch careening through an island fortress for 90 minutes? Corman made the cars of 2000 look stegasaurus cool, while I can see Anderson's bashed-up gas guzzlers (well, minus the 50mm guns) on I-275 anytime.

I'd love to drop a quarter again into a Death Race 2000 game. I'm not sure I'd pay much more than that for the movie when it'll be in video stores before Halloween.